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Poor Hugh. :(

But otherwise – to quote myself* quoting Malcolm – fucking brilliant.

Because is there ever a clearer explanation Malcolm’s power over the press, when he was at the very height of his power?

(I used to be the fucking pharaoh…)

What I find so interesting about it is how Malcolm’s power over the press is  actually also the limits of that power. This scene is from the earliest of the glory days of series 1, but WE can see into the future and WE know one of the major themes of series 3 is what happens when the press stops caring about access to the government, which means they no longer have to pretend to believe Malcolm’s messages, which means he has no control over them, which means he has no control over the messages, and so what power does he have then?

Keep reading

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Series 2 episode 2

Following a cabinet reshuffle Julius Nicholson, an outside advisor, arrives to investigate the policies of all the major departments. Tucker is outraged and sees it as his job to be obstructive. Learning that the P.M.'s wife is known for her dislike of him and with his appearance on 'Question Time' fallen through, Hugh aims to soften up the press by throwing a party, only to find that Nicholson is doing the same. This really is the time for Tucker to start those Chinese whispers and put paid to Nicholson.

Original air date: October 27, 2005

Julius makes his appearance! Come join me in my solitary rewatch of TTOI and make it less solitary and more social and stuff!

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So I've started "The Thick of It", and seeing as you obviously know all the ins and outs of it, I was wondering if I could get your opinion on something. When Hugh asks Malcolm "Do you get lonely?", do you think his "No" was genuine? My first thought was that it *was* and that he's genuinely bewildered by Hugh asking such a thing, but now I can't help but wonder if there some deflection going on...

Yay, a TTOI question!  And not just any question, but the one I always use for Valentine’s Day because Malcolm’s face when Hugh asks him is just priceless.

In the context of the scene I DO think his no is perfectly genuine and not just because he REALLY doesn’t want to talk about his feelings and/or go out on any moonlit strolls with Hugh. (Poor Hugh). 

There is no doubt in my mind that Malcolm CAN be very lonely, but I don’t think that’s something that really defines him in the early part of the series* the way it starts to in series 3 and then almost totally does in series 4. 

*early part of the series = everything up to the end of Spinners and Losers

Not that we have much to go in series 1 in terms of Malcolm’s internal life, but I would say that despite the long hours and the exhaustion and the screw-ups he keeps making because of the long hours and the exhaustion, the Malcolm we meet in the first six episodes is absolutely having the time of his life and wouldn’t want it any other way.

(Which actually, probably explains quite a lot about some of the Very Bad Decisions he makes later on, but that’s, as they say, a whole other thing.)

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Series 2 episode 1.

Something goes terribly wrong at a ministerial visit to a factory and only Malcolm can help; Ollie is seconded to work at Number 10 with Malcolm, but only because he has an insider view of the Opposition after a one night stand.

Original air date October 20, 2005.

My personal, lonely, needs-you-to-join-in rewatch of The Thick of It is now at series 2! Join me on this Tucker Tuesday in watching this episode and reacting to it somehow, anyhow: fic, gifsets, live-tweeting blow-by-blows, meta essays, whatever comes to mind! 

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If you follow up-to-the-minute  Real Life UK politics you’ll probably be able to guess why this particular scene on this particular morning.  Because, wow.*

Of course in this one instance the scale in TTOI was actually on a much much much much smaller scale than current Real Life.  Seriosuly, in current Real Life, Cliff would be only one of a crowd of (brutally sacked) former ministers at the soapy tit wank Number 10 farewell.

(Another difference is that the new PM is doing the sacking herself, but that’s just as well really because if she DID have a Malcolm, she wouldn’t want him to start his first day on the job sacking half the cabinet.  I mean, what could possibly ever live up to the fun of that for the entire rest of the time he has the job? No, it would all be downhill from there and someone like Malcolm should always have something to look forward to.)

*It’s like the Night of Long Knives …except in the morning. 

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I’ll close out this fortnight of almost-entirely-Malcolm-posts with my yearly tribute to the original Malcolm running.  Obviously, the best part is the, you know, running, but the *other* best part is how Glenn doesn’t even look up from his computer when Malcolm flies past him.  Malcolm’s entry at considerable speed must happen ALL the time at DoSA.

And I know I’ve quoted this before from the 103 commentary, but it always bears repeating:

Adam Tandy: We made him run down– Chris Addison: That’s the funniest thing ever. Adam Tandy: –Whitehall twice. Chris Addison: All the clever satire aside, there is NOTHING funnier than Capaldi running. Adam Tandy: He really, really gave it everything he had. It was the last thing we shot and I don’t think we could have shot anything else that day.

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“Margaret Thatcher used to survive on less than four hours of sleep a night,” Hugh says. “How is that possible?”

“Monkey glands,” says Glenn.

Title card. It’s series 1 episode 2 of The Thick of It.

“I work, I eat, I shower. That’s it. Occasionally, I take a dump. Just as a sort of treat. I mean that really is my treat.” Conspiratorial lean toward Glenn. (At this point I’d be sidling out of the room.) “That’s what it’s come to. I sit there, I, I think, no, I’m not gonna read the New Statesman. This time is just for me. This is quality time.”

And thus we feel a moment of sympathy for Hugh, poor Cabinet Minister Hugh, with a house and a flat in London (note plot point) and a lot of very pointless work to get through.

Terri canceled his interview because it would clash with the two minute’s silence (thus telling us when this episode is set). Once again, sullen unappreciated competence from the professional civil servant, the bare minimum required.

“Hello, Malcolm!” Fuzzed out yelling. “No, he hasn’t yet. No.” More fuzzed out telephone yelling, repeated in fragments by Terri. It’s hard to disagree with any of Simon Hewitt’s descriptions of Hugh. Malcolm must know they’re on target, nonetheless he must destroy Hewitt; that’s the joy/pathos/terror of Malcolm’s job.

Glenn’s finest moment follows. “We throw so much shit back at them, that they can’t pick up shit, they can’t throw shit, they can’t do shit.”

And we’re less than four minutes in. Good lord.

Now Hugh crows about how he’s booked all the meeting rooms so Terri can’t find them. They brainstorm, if you can call that brainstorming. Ollie and Glenn bickering is my jam. I could watch them insult each other all day.

Malcolm strides in; he knew where they were.

“Him and Cliff are as tight as two ass-cheeks. It’s personal. It’s back-slapping. It’s borderline homoerotic.”

“Who’s the only gay in the village?” Malcolm asks. Hugh has no idea what Little Britain is. Malcolm describes the zeitgeist tapes the PM gets; Ollie nods because he knows about them; he’s clued in; look at how clued in Ollie is!

“God, that’s how the PM always looks so clued up! I always thought he was genuinely quite with it.”

“No, no, he’s as bad as you.”

Malcolm spends far more time on whether Hugh knows anything about the East Enders than he will ever devote to Hugh’s policies. His job is media; he doesn’t care about Hugh’s policies. It’s not like Hugh is minister of Transport or anything important. Terri doesn’t care about Hugh’s policy choices either. Hugh doesn’t care. He’s asking Terri to pick because he has no actual opinions about his job.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

They decide to use a focus group. Focus group? No, actually, a single focus person.

“Do you get lonely?” Hugh asks Malcolm.

A beat. “No.”

“Neither do I.”

THE SATSUMAS MAKE THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE as Malcolm takes a call from Simon Hewitt, whom Malcolm apparently loathes.

“Malcolm, hope I didn’t wake you up.”

Malcolm spits a seed. Sexual jealousy of some kind makes an appearance.

The focus group story is about to break; Malcolm swings into pointless action to kill a true story. “At times of stress I make jokes!” A Professionals joke. One no one gets. Having given Hugh nothing of consequence to do to get him out of the mess, Malcolm sits him down to cram for his interview with Angela Heaney. The tape reveals a plot point: the focus person (singular) is an actress playing a part, not an actual representative of middle England.

Cue one of my favorite scenes: Hugh hiding in the cupboard while Malcolm coaxes him out. For some reason they drag the focus person actress in and try to coax her into giving an interview to their pet friendly reporter, the much-abused Angela Heaney.

“You’re gonna be spread out there in front of them like a trollope in the stocks.” Malcolm can use some lovely evocative language when he wants to.

At the end of the ranting and raving and Malcolm screaming “FUCK!” at the wall, they are left with the realization that they went public with the story about the fucked-up focus group themselves, thus doing Simon Hewitt’s work for him. Too much spin-doctoring “on the hoof” as Terri might say; not enough asking questions to verify assumptions. A tale told by a cluster of three idiots, full of sound & Malcolm’s fury, signifying nothing.

I am left wondering for the second time in two episodes if everything would have worked out better if Malcolm had done nothing at all.

A metaphor for his entire career, perhaps.

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Series 1 episode 2

Hugh Abbot, the new minister for social affairs, seeks advice from a focus group on which one of two contradictory policies to go for; Number 10's policy enforcer Malcolm Tucker is concerned that the minister seems out of touch.

Originally aired May 26, 2005.

This week’s episode! Post your reactions on Tucker Tuesday, July 5, and I’ll do my best to collect them & reblog them. Your reactions can be in any form you like. I personally go for the live-tweeting style. You might want to write fic or make gifsets or surprise us all with an entirely new reaction modality. That would be awesome, IMO.

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The Thick of It s01e01 rewatch

The kind of thing I’d live-tweet if I were live-tweeting it:

What I’m watching in the first scene is Terri, a character who’ll stay through the whole show. She takes the cases from Cliff, in what appears to be an offer of help but is not. It is, in the end, a meaningless gesture that is retracted the moment it actually matters.

“Do you mind taking them?”

“Why?”

“Malcolm’s there.”

Malcolm’s power or rather the fear of him is in the minister. And we see why: he’s foul-mouthed and he’s in charge. The minister is less important than he is. The minister waits for Malcolm to finish his phone call then fawns over him. The attempts he makes later in the conversation to assert his status are pointless.

“Fuck off. Fuck off, darling.”

Malcolm reassures him then digs in the knife. It becomes clear that Malcolm has planned it all out and it’s already accomplished. He simply doesn’t give a shit.

“Get on the fucking phone. Now.”

Title card, then complete repetition of the initial sequence.

We see Glenn! Ollie! Bickering like the odd couple they are.

“The one with the spending implications?” Terri asks. She is, as in the sequence with the suitcase, helpful until it matters. Ollie patronizes her, and that’s the last straw for her.

What is the business with Hugh and his driver?

“I’m going to mop up a fucking hurricane of piss here from these neurotics.”

Then Malcolm creates the mess that the rest of the episode is about. Glenn underlines this by saying that Tucker isn’t always right.

Ollie patronizes Angela Heaney. She reacts as well as anybody does to Ollie’s patronizes. Glenn bullies Terri. Ollie flip-flops and Angela is correct.

“It’s not that easy to come up with Das Kapital in the back of a cab, Glenn.”

“National spare room database.” Thus Ollie invents AirBnb ahead of its time. “Springy concrete.”

The haplessness of the trio. The absolute lack of message. The return of the trio, feeling triumphant. A sequence I absolutely love follows, because it illustrates the power hierarchy: first Glenn shuts the door in Ollie’s face, then he shuts it in Terri’s face, then Malcolm appears. And the door is shut decisively in Glenn’s face.

Malcolm then must deliver the news that he was wrong: the PM wants to go with the snooper squad story because the PM is playing hardball politics with Treasury. Thus the political football is kicked around. Nobody gives a tinker’s damn about DOSAC and its policies. It is all pointless. It’s posturing. Hugh then attempts to twit Malcolm, with predictable results. “Should” as pun on “shoot”. Malcolm does not react well. Then he lays out the rules of how the press interacts with the government. They pretend to believe what they must because they don’t get information if they don’t cooperate with Malcolm.

Hugh starts to look competent in his live radio interview, then gets the name of the benefits inspection squad wrong. and his complete uselessness is made clear. He’s a marzipan dildo.

Both topic and means are established: this is a comedy about useless people engaged in useless posturing in the government for power that isn’t very powerful, because the sweary Scottish man is the only one of them who holds any power at all. And he only holds it because the PM is an all-powerful, never-seen God.

There will be no West Wing moment here, where the off-screen person we’ve been fretting over all episode appears (as played by Martin Sheen). There’s no point him appearing. It’s not about him. It’s not about any real decisions. It’s about pointlessness. It’s about Hugh wanting a new driver.

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Perception

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A lot of The Thick of It is based around perception, or more especially, misperception.  This theme is even more important in the pilot when the show is busy introducing us to its characters and setting.  This is maybe my third time watching this episode, so on top of everything happening in it, my perception of it is also affected by knowing the end point of all the characters.

The series opens up with a character that I had completely forgotten about.  He’s our first person, our hook into the series, someone we would perceive as important for that very reason.  As he approaches his office we meet Terri for the first time and are introduced to the idea of Malcolm.  We haven’t met this mysterious Malcolm Tucker yet, but from Cliff and Terri we’re told we should be terrified.

This pilot loves to play with perception, to twist it around quite a bit and show us how complex it can really turn out to be.  We enter Cliff’s office with fear, ready to face whatever dread this Malcolm Tucker is bringing for our main character.  But then Malcolm is nice?  For a full minute or two Malcolm turns out to be this calm, kind, understanding person here to support Cliff - our main character - through the media storm.  Until we hit the drop.  Despite his understanding words, Malcolm is here to fire Cliff, or rather to tell him that he has resigned earlier without his knowledge or consent.  Bye bye main character.  Audience, meet Malcolm Tucker.  He’s an asshole and you’re probably going to fall in love with him before the series ends.

Then we meet everyone else - Hugh, Glen, and Olly.  Hugh wants to push some initiative that seems to have the horrible title of “Snooper Force”.  The only thing a horrifying title like that is meant to tell us is that Hugh is slightly ridiculous and we should be cautious to take him seriously.  Glen is apparently there to back up Hugh as much as possible and to share a contentious relationship with Olly and Terri (one that develops beautifully, and somewhat tragically, in series 4).  Olly was dumped via email and is pushed to work with the very same woman who did said dumping.  He lets his job walk all over him and humiliate him throughout the episode.  We’re meant to think he’s pathetic down to the fact that he has trouble making a phone call in a moving vehicle because he gets motion sickness (and wow is his character development something to watch for, especially as it builds to the end point in the series finale years later).  Terri is the one person who seems to have a head on her shoulders.

The episode centers around “flip flop” - the constant back and forth of whether or not to go through with the Snooper Force initiative (and the fear that Angela has of how her coworkers perceive her).  Surprisingly, a lot of the conflict traces its way back to Malcolm.  Malcolm, like Terri, is just trying to follow the rules on this one and he expects everyone else to follow those same rules.  Suddenly, Hugh doesn’t follow the rules so Malcolm pulls him in line, but then the invisible character of the PM doesn’t follow either and it all becomes a mess.  Malcolm is a control freak, but he can’t control the PM.  The whole mess could have been avoided with simple communication between all the characters, but Hugh wanted to have a chance at something big, the PM wanted to tell the treasury to fuck off, and Malcolm tried to control everyone instead of simply talking to them before making decisions.  All three of them want to be perceived as someone with power, but they all fuck up instead because they couldn’t simply work together effectively.

Malcolm, our terrifying nice guy, is less powerful than we may have first imagined.

But even the entire situation itself is perceived incorrectly by all the characters.  It’s blown entirely out of proportion, seen as something far more important than it truly if the project could be so easily killed in the final seconds of the episode as they casually walk out of the building in the early morning.  We watched them run around the whole episode, emotions high, for something that turned out to not matter much anyway.  Welcome to The Thick of It.

Honorable mentions:

“Get Used to Cliff.”

Snooper Force is simultaneously creepy and makes me think of Snoop Dogg.

Terri is the only one with her head on straight and they try to throw the blame on her.

Olly and I have one thing in common - I too get horrible motion sickness.  It’s difficult for me to even be in a moving vehicle.

The comments about the press - and therefore the public - are interesting.  The show is directly telling us we’re only interesting is scandalous things, while drawing us into a situation that is supposedly important before turning out to be something not important at all.

The fact that no one reports on Hugh’s boring press conference also brings up another point.  Him doing his job right shouldn’t have to be rewarded.  He’s already being paid with taxpayer money.

Is the unseen Tom from Transportation the Tom?

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Why not spend half an hour watching Malcolm argue with Hugh over the meaning of “should”?

Series 1 episode 1

Hugh seeks advice on which one of two contradictory policies to go for; Malcolm Tucker is concerned.

Originally aired May 19, 2005

Post your reactions on Tucker Tuesday, June 28 to join in on the fun! If you want me to do all the work of queuing and tagging, submit to this group blog!

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Series 1 episode 1

Hugh seeks advice on which one of two contradictory policies to go for; Malcolm Tucker is concerned.

Originally aired May 19, 2005

Post your reactions on Tucker Tuesday, June 28 to join in on the fun! If you want me to do all the work of queuing and tagging, submit to this group blog!

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Tomorrow the rewatch commences!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, the day after Tucker Tuesday, we’ll commence our group rewatch of The Thick of It. Each week we’ll rewatch one episode of our favorite look behind-the-scenes of British politics and then we’ll react in whatever way we want! If you would like to participate in group reactions, I’d love it if you could submit posts to this blog, @ttoi-rewatch, for the episode of the week. I’ll queue them all up to post through the day on our favorite day of the week, Tucker Tuesday.

Some questions I have invented, and some answers that I have invented equally follow.

Q: What qualifies as a reaction? A: Anything you choose to create about the episode we just rewatched! Meta essays, emotional blurts, exhaustive investigations into the timelines of the episode in question, gifsets, fanmixes, fan art, fic: anything. 

Q: Do I have to post them here? A: Nope. I mean, I might not chase things down and reblog them, but I just want to rewatch TTOI and thought I’d like to share the experience because I’m like that. If you join in on the rewatch in any way, that’s enough to make me happy.

Q: What, no rules? A: I just want the shared experience of watching something with other people. Only, you know, over the internet.

Q: Is this a Tucker-centric rewatch? A: No! All TTOI characters are interesting to us! Julius, Jamie, Nicola, Ollie, the hapless Hugh, the odious Steve Fleming, Terri-- we care about them all. 

Q: Can I post my reactions late? E.g., after we’ve started the next episode?  A: Yup. I’ll post them with the tag for the episode.

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Coming up soon! TTOI rewatch

I’m going to be rewatching The Thick of It, and this time I want company. This means you! Every week on Wednesday I’ll post the episode we’ll watch that week. We all watch & react to it in whatever way we like: gifsets, picspams, videos, fic, fanart– whatever! Submit your posts to this blog if you like, and I will queue everything up so it posts on Tucker Tuesday. Repeat until we watch Malcolm decide that whatever it was he had to say didn’t matter after all.

Spread the word!